Treble at the Jam Fest

by Leslie Budewitz

  I followed more slowly. After our heart-to-heart about Adam, Tanner and I had kept on walking, saying nothing more about chemo or Minneapolis. He had never mentioned giving half the business to Adam, or leaving him the rest in his will, though he had to know I knew.

  But our walk had given me an idea.

  I ignored the siren call of fresh Roasted Tomato Pesto and followed my thoughts upstairs. I sank into my chair, leaned forward, elbows on my knees.

  My thinking pose.

  It made sense that Tanner turned to Adam in time of distress. He trusted Adam more than anyone. The feeling was mutual—or almost. I liked to think Adam trusted me that deeply.

  Adam could run a camp like clockwork. He could run a recreation program for kids. Run a bar tab, or a half-marathon.

  But a textile and clothing company with a million moving parts?

  No. I didn’t think that’s what Tanner needed from Adam. That would be like asking a leopard to become a zebra.

  I sat back, arms crossed. Bad metaphor, but it got to the heart of the matter: We all have our skills. Tanner might wish for a business partner he trusted like he trusted Adam. But asking Adam to take over if Tanner couldn’t keep on would be like me asking Nick or Chiara to take over the Merc.

  Or my mother, who’d loved the Merc so much she’d nearly run it into the ground. Molly had other dreams, and her little brother Henry hadn’t finished school yet. My other cousins had their own lives. For better or worse, I was the one with the bone-deep attachment to this pile of bricks.

  Tanner could no more move out here for treatment and run his business from a distance than I could pick up and move to Minneapolis.

  But there was one thing I could do.

  I grabbed my phone while the computer warmed up. Sent Adam a text: I have a plan. Love you.

  Right now, I needed to update our Facebook page, schedule a few Tweets, and add the latest products to our e-commerce site. My fingers flew across the keys, pausing when my phone let out a short buzz. A text from Adam: Good plan. I smiled.

  Updates done, I opened the Spreadsheet of Suspicion. Dashed downstairs for a refreshing cold drink. My mother had set out samples of her Roasted Tomato Pesto and Kalamata Olive Tapenade. It would be cruel to tempt the customers with the aromas and not let them sample the goods. Not to mention missing a business opportunity. A happy tongue and tummy send Buy! Buy! signals to the brain.

  I slathered samples on crackers piled high on a napkin, snatched my water, and scooted upstairs.

  Sat at the desk and pondered the clues and questions surrounding Gerry Martin’s death.

  First question: Was it murder? I thought so, and Ike Hoover agreed. Tanner had seen a shove, not a slip and fall during a heated confrontation. Not to mention that days later, no one had come forward confessing to an argument gone wrong.

  I entered Y for yes.

  Who? Big question. Nearly everyone upset with Martin had a reason to be in or near the village between nine thirty, when Michelle sold him coffee, and ten-ish, when Adam and Tanner clambered up the rocks to his body.

  The body. Gerry Martin. You can know how old a guy was when he made his first recording and his first stage appearance. How many Grammy nominations, how many wins. How many gold and platinum albums he’d earned, how many songs had appeared in movies.

  You can know everything someone wants you to know, and still not know what drove them.

  I thought over what I knew. He’d first come to Jewel Bay a few years ago, at Rebecca’s urging. He’d become a festival regular, leading to plans to open a recording studio and a sort of B&B for bands. But he’d dropped the idea. Why? Because his relationship with Rebecca was ending? Or was that a chicken and egg thing? Or because Barber, who’d made himself a major figure in the festival organization, had wanted him gone?

  And would his decision to drop the studio plans and quit the festival have angered someone enough to shove him off a cliff?

  Anyone besides Rebecca?

  Suspect everyone, I reminded myself, and made a note in the Motive column where it intersected the row labeled with her name.

  The next question was Martin’s shoes. I typed in city boots. Pulled up the photos from Derek D’Orazi’s phone. Doesn’t matter how sharp and clear the photos are if the object is blurry and imprecise. And these were. Because of a struggle, or because the dirt could not hold an impression? In other spots along the trail, dense, heavy soil held moisture from Friday’s rains, but in this spot, the soil was thin and slippery.

  Deadly.

  I stared at the footprints again. Mostly large, from work boots or sturdy shoes, worn by the EMTs and firemen. On closer look, I saw a few undefined, barely discernible prints that could have been Martin’s, or my imagination. A few partials, vaguely like running shoes. No surprise—dozens of people walk and run the trail every day.

  That was a call for forensics experts. I had no idea how they study footprints, what databases they consult, how they match a pattern to a shoe. But most of us change shoes regularly. My sister and I have identical spring green Mary Janes, in the same size, and nearly every woman who works at Le Panier or the bistro wears cherry red rubber clogs. Shoes aren’t one-of-a-kind, unlike fingerprints or DNA.

  Which reminded me of the paper cup. Le Panier was hardly alone in using plain white paper cups. I’d seen the same ones yesterday at Perk Up.

  I added a column for the cup to the spreadsheet and put a question mark in the top row, Martin’s row. As a clue, the cup was too generic to be much help. At least to me. Like the footprints, I left it to the professionals.

  One last addition, to the Gabby Drake row: Push? Innocent—meaning Ann and music—or ???

  I stood to stretch as best I could in a room barely eight by ten with an angled ceiling. My grandfather had tucked this space under the eaves in the days when everyone in this end of the valley bought groceries at the Merc, and a trip to Pondera was a major outing. He’d used extra planking from the Orchard house, cut and milled nearby, for the floors. No wonder I loved the place. It was my heritage.

  Back to work, Erin. That spreadsheet isn’t going to finish itself.

  I hadn’t been able to identify who Martin might have run into Saturday morning at Le Panier, but I could make a few guesses. Most of my suspects, as it turned out. Rebecca lived and worked in the village. Barber lived within spitting distance of the trailhead. Either of them could easily have seen Martin, and taken the opportunity to confront him.

  Sam. Ike put him high on the list. He claimed an alibi but admitted he couldn’t prove it—not even his own wife could testify that he’d been home, working on the compressor-cooler thingie all that morning.

  The Drakes. They were staying close by. Any of the three of them was a possibility.

  I sighed and rolled my chair back. My list was too long. How could I rule anyone in or out?

  “Think sideways,” I’d once heard a speaker on creative problem solving counsel. I tipped my ear toward my shoulder. Not what the expert had in mind, but it couldn’t hurt. I desperately needed a new perspective.

  Which made me think of Perspective, Rebecca’s gallery. A good name, though much of the art did little for me emotionally. Odd as it had been to see her in Pondera, it had been stranger to see her cozy up with the Drakes.

  Why were they out here? And what project had gotten them so jazzed over lunch?

  “Erin? I got your text. You’ve got orders for me to pack?”

  I swiveled toward the door. Straight from her after-school training run, Zayda George wore hot-pink-and-purple stretch capris with lime-green-and-turquoise runners. Long gone the silver eyebrow stud the teenager had worn last winter, a detail that nearly did her in. She’d tied back her white-blond hair, inherited from the Icelandic half of her family. Mottled purple guitar picks hung from her ears.

  A festival fashion trend that had
escaped me.

  “Hey, great to see you. When’s graduation? Three weeks?”

  “Two,” she said, sounding both excited and nervous.

  I grabbed a file folder full of printouts and led the way to the basement. Once a repository for disorganized Christmas decorations and antique spiderwebs, it now held the key to the future.

  Or so all the small-business gurus say. When those gurus urge

  e-commerce, they forget to tell you you’re going to need a system.

  But if there’s one thing I’m good at it, it’s working out a system.

  So far, I had a long table with slots underneath for flat boxes in a range of sizes, a giant roll of bubble wrap with its own cutter mounted on one end. I had shelves loaded with the products we ship most often—jams and jellies, pestos and sauces, and dried pasta. With any luck, we’d be doing enough mail-order traffic in our drink line, Luci’s soaps, and Ray’s products to fill another set of shelves by summer’s end. And I had two teenagers who came in after school and on Saturdays, trading off when Zayda had a track meet or Dylan had a theater rehearsal.

  And I had nearly a dozen new orders, plus three cartons for Tanner. Once orders picked up—this summer, if all went well—we might have a dedicated iPad and printer in the basement for orders and packing slips.

  Zayda taped boxes while I pulled the first orders, all gift packs of Montana preserves.

  “I hear you and Dylan both got into film school. Congrats.”

  “Yeah.” The tape made a shrieky-stretchy sound as she yanked the dispenser across a cardboard seam. “Thanks.”

  We worked in silence. She set the three boxes on the table, laid a square of bubble wrap in each one, and positioned the cardboard divider. I slid in the jars, double-checking the packing slips, then peeled off the shipping labels. Zayda sealed the boxes, I added labels, and we stacked them at the end of the table. The business gurus also forgot to say don’t set up your packing and shipping station in the basement, but we had no other option. I consider box-lugging part of my workout routine.

  “Erin,” she finally said, as she stacked the next batch of box flats on the table. “How did you know Adam is The One?”

  An out-of-the-blue question, until I remembered that Dylan’s mother worried about the kids’ eloping. Tread carefully, Erin.

  “By dating a lot of guys who weren’t.” I checked off the items on the next packing slip. Some lucky soul was getting an Italian feast in a box.

  “But did you think they were? And then find out they were douche­canoes?”

  I capped the stinky marker and looked her straight on.

  “Dylan thinks it’s stupid to go to the same school, take the same classes, and pay for two dorm rooms. To share the bathroom sink with strangers when we already know we want to be together.” Her words spilled over each other like water rushing over the boulders in the Jewel River. “He thinks we should get married. This summer.”

  “What do you think?”

  Her dark Greek eyes filled and she clung to the edge of the table. I snared a stool and rolled it toward her.

  “Sit,” I ordered, and she sat.

  It would be easy to say that if she was sure, she wouldn’t be asking, but that wouldn’t be fair. “Zayda, you’re both young. Which is a terrible thing to say, I know. But it’s true. And you are going to get your heart broken, whether in a relationship, or a job, or some other part of life. You can’t protect yourself from that.”

  She sniffed, eyes on me.

  “You know Polly Paulson and Bunny Burns?” I continued. “They’re twins—Paulette and Bernadette Easter. We went all the way through school together. Bunny married our classmate Rob Burns and Polly married Pat Paulson, who was a year ahead of us, in a double wedding six months after graduation.”

  “They’re still married,” she said.

  “Yep. And I’d be surprised if they don’t go to the grave married.” I picked up the marker again. “And none of them has ever lived anywhere but Jewel Bay. Polly works in the drug store and Pat drives the Coca-Cola truck. Rob and Bunny bought the brewery his dad started. It’s the life they chose, and I think they’re happy. But it’s not the life you’ve talked about, traveling the world making movies.”

  “You sound like my mother.” She made air quotes. “Keep your options open.”

  “More like keep your heart open. Can you do what you want with your life if you and Dylan tie the knot now?” The ticking wall clock caught my attention. “Oh, pooh. We’ve gotta get these to the post office. Tanner’s boxes can wait.”

  We zipped the last few packages together and loaded them into my car. I tossed her my keys.

  “Erin.” Zayda sniffed and wiped her nose on her long sleeve. “Thanks.”

  I held up a hand in acknowledgment and watched her drive off.

  Telling other people what to do is easy. Running my own life?

  Not so much.

  Twenty-Four

  I grabbed another bottle of mineral water and sank onto a red stool. Too many thoughts, too many emotions, too many of them not my own.

  My mother stood on the other side of the stainless steel counter, her garden print apron slightly wilted, her olive skin flushed from the kitchen heat and steam.

  “Smells great, Mom.”

  “Thank you, Erin. I find few things more satisfying than sending a new creation out into the world. A tad bit terrifying, too.”

  My mother, terrified? Wonders never cease.

  “What’s bothering you, darling? Not the investigation?”

  I ached to tell her. Because I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about Adam. I knew my heart, and I thought I knew his. And unlike young Zayda, I knew what I wanted.

  But I didn’t know how to get from here to there.

  I put on a smile. Not the time or place, even though she’d asked. I didn’t want to interfere with her happiness.

  “Um, yeah. Kinda. There’s so much I don’t know yet. Gerry Martin’s relationship with Rebecca Whitman, for one.”

  “Rebecca’s not easy to get to know,” my mother said. “But she loves Jewel Bay.”

  The cold bubbles tickled my throat. “Seems like she’s planted herself pretty deep, snatching up property.”

  “Not to mention propping up a few businesses, in return for a stake. When Ned made noises last summer about cutting back, she approached him about buying a controlling share of the bar. He sent her packing, but that’s what gave him the idea to offer me the building.”

  And he’d started training his grandson to take over. My mother had become Ned’s landlord, but she kept her fingers out of his business. Except for remodeling the women’s room into a room women didn’t mind using, and making a few other improvements that Ned liked to call “all that la-di-dah.” But he said it with a twinkle in his eye.

  How, I wondered, had Rebecca’s investments played in to her arrangements with Gerry Martin? Had that been what he meant when he accused her of “false pretenses”? Terms of the deal that weren’t what he’d expected?

  Or because she’d lost the position that gave her the ability to boost his brand?

  “Is she difficult to work with?” I asked.

  “Better to say she drives a hard bargain. I’m sure that’s part of her success. And successful women sometimes trigger resentment.”

  “From men and women.”

  “I’m afraid that’s true. Darling, why don’t you bring the boys by for dinner tonight? You and I can have a little talk.”

  “Can’t. I do need to come over—there’s a few things stashed in the house that I’ve been meaning to take off your hands. But we promised Tanner a boat ride and a picnic on the dock. Spare me some of that new pesto?”

  She set a jar, not yet labeled, on the counter. “Lou Mary seems to be settling in well.”

  “She seemed worried earlie
r, but she’s doing great. You never did say why you wanted me to hire her, but you were right.”

  “Excuse me.” A woman’s voice broke in and I swiveled toward a plump woman about my age standing by the meat cooler. “You work here, right? A friend recommended your meat.”

  “All local.” I slid off the stool. Lou Mary was helping a customer at the sidewalk produce cart, and I didn’t see Tracy. “Local pigs and cows, local butcher.”

  We stood at the cooler, discussing cuts, how the sausage was flavored, and our wild game offerings. She chose several varieties, and I followed her to the front counter.

  I filled her shopping bag and took her credit card. “When’s your baby due?” The moment the words were out, I wished I could take them back.

  “I’m not pregnant,” she said. “Just fat.”

  “What are you planning to serve with all that beautiful meat?” Lou Mary asked, trailing her own customer through the front door. “We have fresh pasta and sauces. And asparagus so tender you can practically run it under hot water and it’s done.”

  Bless the woman, she bought a pound of asparagus, fresh linguine, and basil pesto, and accepted a free trial-size bar of lavender soap.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” I said when the door closed behind the woman’s ample rear end. “I so know better. Thanks for the rescue.”

  “I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth so many times,” Lou Mary said, “I have scars on my ankles. Part of the territory.”

  “That’s some consolation. Things going okay?”

  “Oh, yes. Honestly, I never knew how many interesting products the Merc carries. I’m going to try that special sauerkraut tonight with a pork roast.”

  “And Tracy?”

  She put a hand on my arm, her turquoise and carnelian ring so large I wondered how she got it on and off. “She’s a lovely young woman, reassessing her life, like you are. It’s natural, at your age.”

  “You’re quite remarkable, you know that?”

  She laughed, a deep, throaty, ex-smoker’s laugh. The door to the back hall opened and Tracy emerged, smoothing her skirt.